Live Nation Kills Service Fees for June

Nothing sucks the fun out of buying concert tickets (Like, for, say, the upcoming Arcade Fire tour, mayhaps?) quite like sneaky service charges.

Luckily, temporary relief from those crazy charges may be in sight—for a month, anyway. Concert promotion giant Live Nation Entertainment, which merged with Ticketmaster in early 2010, announced they would forgo service charges for their artists and amphitheaters for the entire month of June, the Los Angeles Times reports. They’re calling it “No Service Fees June.” According to the release from Live Nation, this move will affect more than 700 shows by a wide range of artists at 50 venues nationwide, for a total of about eight million tickets.

This news comes shortly after Live Nation held a conference call in May, during which company executives expressed interest in implementing a “dynamic pricing” plan for tickets to make up for revenue losses following the merger. Reports following the call have led to speculation that Live Nation will increase the base price of its tickets, even though concert attendance has decreased according to their First Quarter report released in May 2010. With all this in mind, the service fee kill will prove to be an interesting experiment.

A list of artists and venues to which “No Service Fees June” will apply can be found here.

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